Today my lower back, right down near my rear is suddenly feeling really crampy sore. I think it's slowly starting to dawn on my body that i am doing a lot more exercise. We walk absolutely everywhere, and all around the city yesterday - which leads me to - Wuxi City.
As we had the day off yesterday, it was prime time to jump on bus no.42 and head into the city. Mr Pan lead us through a housing community(which we english taught him was called a ShortCut - something he's been dropping whenever he can now - even his english teacher wife didnt know the word) to one of the streets where the bus stop is. The bus is 2 coins in every direction - 2 coins = 2 yuan(chinese rmb) which equates to around 30 cents or so. The bus trip to the city took around 25 minutes.
The bus itself wasnt too bad. There were no seats so we had to stand, and any time a seat opened up, a chinese person would beeline to it like it was their lifes primary objective. The problem here was standing we couldnt really see out the windows without bending half over. We were on the lookout for landmarks and features that would help us identify our stop when we returned. Luckily there's a really large governmental building, and the place we had our medical examinations that are closeby, so they both serve as a good indication.
The trip to the city wasnt anything particularly special. All it really did show us was everything in this area looks identical. You drive through identical looking suburbs, all lined with the same kinds of small shops full of the same crap. All the streets are teeming with people going here there and every other direction, and every place you go is dirty and run-down looking. This is supposedly a wealthy part of China too, so i have no idea what the poorer sections would be like.
It's a completely different world. It's so hard to really explain and do it justice for what it's really like. It gets Courtney and I down quite often as it's a very hard place to feel like we belong here. Our apartment doesnt yet feel like a home to us. Our local area outside the school is really not very pleasant. There's no real nice parks or anything like that like we hoped we would see. There seems to be more of that in the city, but the change of season might reveal more along these lines. Sure the school grounds are nice in their own way, but it just doesnt feel right to me. The thought of spending an entire year in these current surroundings is a very hard thing to deal with. I just cant imagine our day to day life not really being any more than what we know right now. Time might heal this, but I don't know. As i said to Courtney yesterday, we may try and mix it up a lot more on the weekends. Spending weekends in the more touristy areas of Hangzhou and Suzhou which are fairly close, and of course Shanghai. Right now though, they all feel so far away.
On top of this it feels like we don't really have any friends. The chinese teachers don't really make the effort to come and join us when we eat or anything like that. All we really get is a smile and a nod in passing, and a few small items of smalltalk from those we already know. I think if there wasn't a Mr Pan - who is probably the only thing keeping us on the happy side at the moment, it would be a different story.
I saw a english teaching school in Wuxi proper called Hy-Lite. I have seen this before in the blog of a westerner living in Wuxi city and it kindled a lot of these feelings. Here is more of a language mill type teaching environment where you would be with a lot more Westerners, and have you know, work-mates. Here, we feel like it's just us. While of course we love each others company, we long for more. Yeah it's early days, and we'll just see how we go over the course of time. We have only been here a week so we know it's too early to make large judgements, but there's things like this that feel really lacking from our day to day lives. That and the fact we havent yet really taken to the teaching - which doesnt help.
The city itself wasnt as big as I thought it might be. As a city, it's not really as big as Melbourne. The scale of a lot of these places I think isnt by a skyline full of buildings, but by the massively populated dusty suburbs that surround them. Wuxi city itself really didnt impress. Yes we found a few western comforts, such as McDonalds and KFC, but how comforting is that? We only used the McDonalds for it's bathroom, and it was still a grotty chinese squat toilet and packed with people no less. The place didnt even smell like a McDonalds, and if it didnt have the golden arches out front, I might not have even guessed it was one.
We found a large market set in a buddist temple which was quite interesting. In the middle of it it had this weird 5 level shopping centre. But the things that it sold were basically just junky crap. Stacks and stacks of chinese books, dvds, more books, anime type stuff, computer game consoles, stationary - HEAPS of stationary. It was really, really bizarre.
Outside there were shops everywhere in really picturesque streets, some extremely narrow - but again their wares were mostly uninteresting. There were bonzai's and teapots and jewelry and plants and you name it what else. There was one large section that was simply pets. Cages and cages of these tiny white rabbits, miniature turtles, tiny little yapping dogs, birds and gold fish. I have no idea where they get all these turtles and rabbits from, but there were _thousands_. Some of the cages for the rabbits were basically just a fraction bigger than the rabbits themselves - kind of cruel - particularly when I could imagine most of them would spend the rest of their lives in them.
We will be heading back into the city this weekend for another look around. It was enjoyable. We did find a fairly modern looking Myer style department store. At this point, modern, clean and western really does appeal when we're feeling like aliens over here. Mr Pan said he will drive us to a famous park near the city sometime soon, and down to Lake Tai Hu. That will be nice. We miss the convenience of having a car, it makes exploring so much easier - but there is no way in hell I would drive a car around here myself. The roads are just crazy.
Here's some photos from our city trip:
Oodles of bunnies.
Picturesque.
It certainly looked good, no doubt there.
There was a full fledged Buddhist temple in the midddle of the market. All this section was empty and appeared to be getting rennovated. Looking at it made me try and imagine it populated back in the old days of China - it would have looked absolutely magnificent.
The workman on the pagoda wouldnt shut up until Courtney took his photo. You can see him waving on the right. They were laying down bamboo strapped together into mat-like things along the existing bamboo trestle. So privative, yet all construction over here uses bamboo this way.
Some broken tiles. You don't really realize just how many there are on each rooftop.
Yep that's snow alright. It's still around the place in big frozen clumps - likely ice as hard as rock now.
This kind of sight makes us very happy. This was in a weird food court. You paid money to have it changed into plastic chips then you used the chips to buy food. It's extra fun when you have no idea how much each one is worth and no-one can tell you. You get this kind of experience frequently around here.
From this woman we bought 4 conventional dumplings and two large meat stuffed buns. When Courtney bit into her dumpling it sprayed juice all over the table and almost all over me. Had she hit me.... I could feel the thoughts of the chinese people walking by when they looked at us dumb westerners sitting around a pool of dumpling juice. Supposedly the way to eat dumplings is bite them - suck out the 'soup', then eat them. This i learned from our super crap TV channel, CCTV9.
Good ol McPagoda's
Wuxi city is surrounded by Canals on all sides. This was one we found opposite the market, with a really nice garden and chinese covered walkway thing here. On the west side of Wuxi is the Grand Canal which leads indirectly up to Shanghai then all the way to Beijing. We are keen to see this as even today it's still used heavily for transporting goods via barge. The Grand Canal itself if somewhat ancient.
This would have been made for the recent Lantern Festival. The Chinese seem to have a fond affection for disney characters. You see lots of them as stickers on the sides of the blue worker trucks that are everywhere.
This is the city itself. In this photo it actually looks quite impressive and city'ish, but in reality it wasn't that huge. It did look cleaner and more spaced out than anything we have here in the suburbs. We are looking forward to exploring i further. We have since discovered that most roads have a side section as seen above specifically for motor scooters. There are scooters _everywhere_. The riders drive them absolutely everywhere also. They would take them into department stores too I reckon if they could get them up the escalators. The problem with these things is they're almost completely silent. One day you might be walking along then suddenly find one up ya clacker. They have no hesitations just riding into people! Ahhh China.
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